of
_e_: sarve, chist, upsot, tumble. Any other may displace _i_: arn
(iron), eetch, hender, whope or whup. The _o_ sounds are more stable,
but we have crap (crop), yan, clus, and many similar variants. Any other
vowel may do for _u_: braysh or bresh (brush), shet, sich, shore (sure).

Mountaineers have peculiar difficulty with diphthongs: haar (hair),
cheer (chair), brile, and a host of others. The word coil is variously
pronounced quile, querl or quorl.

Substitution of consonants is not so common as of vowels, but most
hillsmen say nabel (navel), ballet (ballad), Babtis', rench or rinch,
brickie (brittle), and many say atter or arter, jue (due), tejus,
vascinator (fascinator--a woman's scarf). They never drop _h_, nor
substitute anything for it.

The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers
pronounce it correctly, but some drop the _w_ ('oman), others add an
_r_ (womern and wimmern), while in Michell County, North Carolina, we
hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern ("La, look at all the
dummerunses a-comin'!")

On the other hand, some words that most Americans mispronounce are
always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new
(never doo, noo). Creek is always given its true _ee_ sound, never
crick. Nare (as we spell it in dialect stories) is simply the right
pronunciation of ne'er, and nary is ne'er a, with the _a_ turned into a
short _i_ sound.

It should be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from place
to place, and, even in the same neighborhood, we rarely hear all
families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone
to err by making their characters speak it too consistently. It is only
in the backwoods, or among old people and the penned-at-home women, that
the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns we hear little
of it, and farmers who trade in those towns adapt their speech somewhat
to the company they may be in. The same man, at different times, may say
can't and cain't, set and sot, jest and jes' and jist, atter and arter
or after, seed and seen, here and hyur and hyar, heerd and heern or
heard, sich and sech, took and tuk--there is no uniformity about it. An
unconscious sense of euphony seems to govern the choice of hit or it,
there or thar.

Since the Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, we would
expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as
vocabulary is concerned, t